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So, can I watch videos in my HD3850 with an OS driver?

09-17-2008, 04:09 PM

I've been reading so much about all the recent improvements on the open source drivers (both radeon and radeonhd) that now I don't know whether my card (hd3850) is able to play any video without mplayer complaining about my computer being too slow. I've tried with both open source drivers and X starts, everything seems to work ok and I can even play some HD videos (720p, 1080p) without problems (some tearing, but that's all). But then I try with some crappy resolution videos (640x480 or so) and the audio and video desynchronize after a few seconds and mplayer starts complaining. Of course they work perfectly well with fglrx.

So, is it my fault? Some configuration option that I might be missing? Or are the OS drivers still not there yet for the R600 chips? If so, any idea when they will be usable, besides the "They will be ready when they are ready"? (Usable meaning being able to play all videos; I don't care about 3D.)

There is no acceleration for Video resizing and stuff like this atm. So everything is done via your CPU in software, not with the hardware that is utilized by fglrx. So if you got a really strong CPU it is possible to watch Video on a rather big resolution. For me with a core 2 quad 9300 (each core with 2.5GHz) it is not possible to watch videos fullscreen with radeonhd. The max I can use is somewhere around 1280x800 or the like. It is definitely not possible to watch videos fullscreen at 1920x1200. For this textured video or video via OpenGL would be needed and the support for the >=r6xx cards (that is starting with hd2XXX cards, going all the way up to the recent cards) which is just not there yet. No idea how long it will take until the 3D register specs are finally out...

Comment

I am pretty sure that there is no Xv acceleration in the drivers today for HD3xxx yet. My understanding was that if the driver didn't implement Xv then you simply could not use the Xv API on that display.

My guess is that the player is falling back to X11 output (rather than Xv), which works surprisingly well with shadowfb acceleration.

Comment

I can play any video with -vo x11 under fglrx without problems, from 320x240 to 1920x1080 (I don't use -vo xv or -vo gl since more than a year ago). However, I cannot play many videos under radeon/radeonhd, because the cpu usage goes to 100%, independently from their resolution. There must be something else besides TexturedVideo and opengl that makes videos play smoothly under fglrx.

Comment

I can play any video with -vo x11 under fglrx without problems, from 320x240 to 1920x1080 (I don't use -vo xv or -vo gl since more than a year ago). However, I cannot play many videos under radeon/radeonhd, because the cpu usage goes to 100%, independently from their resolution. There must be something else besides TexturedVideo and opengl that makes videos play smoothly under fglrx.

mplayer -vo x11 uses XImage/shm which looks like it uses fglrx 2D accel to actually scale the image. There is no OSS 2D accel yet for > R500 so radeon[hd] eat CPU.

Forcing mplayer to scale with -vf scale=x:y rather than letting unaccelerated XImage do it may save a small amount of CPU (as it uses mmx) - but not much.

Comment

Basically the answer is that everything on >r600 (HD2xxx line and higher) has to be done on the 3d engine, because it no longer has a dedicated 2d engine. Because of that, all acceleration for these cards is tied up in the IP issues that AMD is currently trying to resolve regarding the release of specs and code for these cards.

Some devs are already coding the open-source accel code for these cards with docs received under NDA, but they can't release that code until AMD figures out the legal end, at which point the docs and the specs will both be released, and basic acceleration code will probably come within a few months of that.

The AMD rep here, bridgman, has said that he doesn't know when the IP review will be done, basically, by the time he knows, it will already be done and the specs will be released the same day.

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Sometimes I wonder if the resulting issues don't outweight the benefits and if everyone would be better off without IP.

Obviously Yes. Intellectual *Property*. *Proprietary* solutions. In an open source world, neither of those two concepts has any place at all. IP laws are supposed to promote innovation, but Open Source promotes innovation far better than any IP scheme ever will.